Good Morning**God Is Watching you He is with you always!! Praise Him In all things
God's Hedge
He has walled me in so I cannot escape; he has weighed me down with chains.
-- Lamentations 3:7
The four walls of a sick room can be so confining, even if you're there only stuck there for a short time. Whether in the hospital or at home, we long to escape those suffocating walls. At such times, you may be tempted to cry out as Jeremiah did in our verse for today, or as Job who groaned, "Why is life given to a man¼whom God has hedged in?" (Job 3:23).
But it's God's hedge and his walls. Only when we view our restricting circumstances as being placed there by God can we find courage to face the wall or hedge. That's what Madame Guyon, a French noblewoman who was confined to a dungeon for ten years, managed to do. She penned these thoughts:
A little bird I am shut from the fields of air;
and in my cage I sit and sing to him who placed me there
Well pleased a prisoner to be, because my God it pleases thee.
Naught have I else to do, I sing the whole day long,
and he whom I most love to please doth listen to my song.
He caught and bound my wandering wing, but still he bends to hear me sing.
My cage confines me round; abroad I cannot fly;
but though my wing is closely bound, my heart's at liberty;
my prison walls cannot control the flight, the freedom of the soul.
The hedge cut off Madam Guyon from the world and confined her on every side. But even a high hedge cannot shut out our view of the sky or prevent the soul from looking up into God's face. Because there is so little else to see, when you are hedged in, you view God more clearly than those who move about unconfined. With a hedge around you, the only way "out" is up!
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My loving Father, help me to remember that hedges and walls protect as well as confine and that your good pleasure is to use whatever means necessary to turn my gaze to you.
